Shifting to an inquiry-based practice can be challenging. How should teachers get started? How many times should teachers plan for inquiry? What do teachers do when students struggle with inquiry? How long does it take for students to buy in to the inquiry process? These kinds of questions, and the concerns that underlie them, can create an…

Seventh-grade students engaged in a guided historical inquiry about slavery, freedom, and unfreedom. The teacher carefully intertwined historical content, close reading, critical thinking, and text-based writing -- both extemporaneous and refined-- during Social Studies. Students scrutinized primary sources to build their historical schemas over…

Teachers value students' close reading of and text-based writing about diverse texts while eliciting their awareness of the world, privilege, and power. Carefully selected literature coupled with primary sources can bridge the classroom and society. To engage modern students in America's racialized past and present, this article guides teachers to…

This study is about a seventh-grade classroom in a predominantly White region in the rural northwestern United States where a White teacher led an interdisciplinary unit on African American narratives of enslavement and freedom fighting. Through the lenses of racial literacy, critical Whiteness studies, and discourse studies, authors use data from…

History education rests at the junction between historical content, disciplinary literacy, and educational psychology. To understand the sources and strategies that facilitate historical thinking, more inquiries are needed. How do students respond to different historical topics, texts, and tasks? Which sources and strategies best facilitate…

This paper reports results from a six-state study of 62 USA social studies classrooms. We examined the extent to which intellectually challenging authentic pedagogy was present in study classrooms, the characteristics of classroom practice at different levels of authentic pedagogy, and how those characteristics may promote or inhibit high levels…

No Child Left Behind has profoundly limited the teaching of history over the past 10 years. Now, the Common Core State Standards offers an opportunity to reverse this decline by giving history a more prominent place in the school curriculum alongside literacy goals. Learning history and argumentative writing is key to developing analytical ways of…

Many school districts across North America have turned to a framework for curriculum design and instruction called "Understanding by Design." Included in the framework is a call for teachers to create "essential questions" that provocatively ask students to consider and learn the "big ideas and core processes within the…

This lesson plan is based on Suzanne Collins's book, "The Hunger Games." Katniss and Gale know about District 12 and the surrounding woods. Additionally, from television coverage, they know that there are twelve districts and the Capitol. District 13 used to exist until the rebellion. But where are these districts now that the geography…

Teacher Jennifer Tyler shares her experience of creating a text set for a social studies unit on colonial America.

The development of the metacognitive skill of prediction in deaf students in a middle school social studies classroom was explored in an action research study (Riel, 2006). After observation of this group of learners and assessment of current skills, a unit was developed that integrated the teaching of prediction into their study of the American…

We compared two approaches to teaching United States history to students with learning disabilities (LD). We randomly assigned students in seventh through ninth grades (n = 44) to separate treatment groups (strategy-based instruction or traditional instruction). In both approaches, students were taught identical content on two units of the Civil…

On their visit to the National Archives Experience in Washington, D.C., students in Jenni Ashley and Gay Brock's U.S. history classes at the Potomac School in McLean, Virginia, participated in a pilot program called "The Constitution by Cell." Armed with their cell phones, a basic understanding of the Constitution, and a willingness to…

This study explored the apprenticeship of students with high-incidence disabilities into the discipline of history through mediation of a web-based instructional environment, the Virtual History Museum (VHM). Thirteen students with high-incidence disabilities spread across two co-taught classrooms participated. They engaged in two units of…

Because of its enormous significance to American history, the author wants her students to gain a rich understanding of the Battle at Gettysburg. She also would like them to make a strong emotional connection to it. She wants her students to engage with the Battle of Gettysburg on many levels--to become tangled up with the past. Her goal is to…